with a prescription of beef, wine and iron, by means of a stomach-funnel. If the little dachshund could have survived the additional affliction, is another question.
The fasting-cure instinct is not limited to our dumb fellow-creatures. It is a common experience that pain, fevers, gastric congestions, and even mental afflictions "take away the appetite," and only unwise nurses will try to thwart the purpose of Nature in that respect. The manager of a large Michigan sanitarium makes it a rule to let his attendants indulge his patients with all the cold water they want to drink, or even coax them to try another glass, but never urge them to eat against their inclination.
"Abstinence is by far too much feared in the treatment of acute diseases generally. We have good reason for believing that many a life has been destroyed by the indiscriminate feeding which is so often practised among the sick. The safety of abstinence will be apparent when we remember how often persons have lain in fevers, dysentery, and other prostrating diseases, fourteen, twenty-one, and even more days without nutriment, and in the end doing well."—Joel Shaw. M.D.
